9-02-05, 8:53 am

When the White House says, 'This isn’t a time for politics,' it usually means they are trying to deflect negative publicity. And those were White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan’s exact words after criticism aimed at federally-managed relief services and the failure to round up enough National Guard personnel in the hardest hit states of Louisiana and Mississippi following hurricane Katrina.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin told reporters on Thursday to expect as many as 1,000 dead in his city alone. Damage estimates, in true insurance company fashion, have rolled in much faster. Early estimates say as much as $26 billion in property damage has occurred. Additionally, flooding due to failed levees has completely cut off oil shipments into that region of the country, fueling a gas price hike and reports of price gouging across the South and into the Midwest.

The slowness of the federal emergency response provoked sharp criticism form New Orleans’ top emergency management expert Terry Ebbert, who yesterday called the Bush administration current efforts 'a national disgrace.'

Observers of the slowness of the emergency response have noted that service in Iraq has depleted the National Guard personnel of most states, but especially in the South. About 6,000 members of the Louisiana and Mississippi National Guard found themselves in Iraq when Hurricane Katrina devastated Louisiana and Mississippi this week, according to an AP report.



Mississippi’s personnel and equipment shortages have prompted its government to beg for help from neighboring states.

Nationally, a much-needed 78,000 of the 437,000 members of the Guard force are serving overseas. This fact has provoked concern among states that have higher percentages of troops in Iraq than do Louisiana and Mississippi. Forest fires in the Western and Plains states and natural disasters on the Pacific coast and in the Midwest are frequent happenings and require National Guard resources to save lives and property.

Such concerns have prompted many state activists and politicians to call on state governments to insist on the return of National Guard troops from Iraq to prepare for serious problems that are likely to rise.

In Mississippi, anger over the slowness of the federal response and the failure to mobilize much larger numbers of National Guard personnel inspired the editors of the Sun Herald of Biloxi, Mississippi to demand, 'where is the National Guard, why hasn't every able-bodied member of the armed forces in South Mississippi been pressed into service?' But the slow response in Louisiana and Mississippi is only one major scandal to arise in the wake of hurricane Katrina. Editor and Publisher published a story on its website on Wednesday showing that much-needed funds for repairing serious and widely-publicized problems with Southeast Louisiana’s levee system were pulled in 2003 in order to pay for the war in Iraq.

The failure of the New Orleans levees during the hurricane resulted in widespread flooding, deaths, and property damage, and will likely fuel a major health crisis.

Throughout 2004 and 2005, according to the article, the Times-Picayune, New Orleans’ largest newspaper, reported several times that funding had been pulled and cited the cost of the Iraq war. This week the Times-Picayune wrote, 'No one can say they didn't see it coming. ... Now in the wake of one of the worst storms ever, serious questions are being asked about the lack of preparation.'

In fact, it was President Bush who proposed spending cuts on the levees surrounding New Orleans. Bush called for cutting funding for the levees by 80 percent. The head of the project to repair and rebuild the levee system at the Army Corps of Engineers had to beg local authorities for money to repair sinking levees last summer as the hurricane season started because of Bush’s demand for cuts for the project.

While the 2004 hurricane system battered the levee system, funding cuts continued into 2005. Repeated warnings from the Army Corps of Engineers, local levee management authorities, and emergency personnel went unheeded.

So while the Bush administration downplays its prominent role in making the results of this enormous natural disaster worse than it needed to be with rhetoric about 'avoiding politics' and 'pulling together,' we have to think about how much a war based on lies has really cost us. It has cost us 1,860 of our family members and now it has contributed to the destruction of one of America’s great cities and the lives and livelihoods of tens of thousands of families along the Gulf Coast.

It’s time to bring the National Guard home so that it can do its real job: to aid in the event of natural disasters and protect the resources of our states, not to fight in wars that we have no business fighting and occupying countries we have no business occupying.

It’s just one more serious way the Bush war on Iraq has made us less safe.

Emergency authorities and experts, along with politicians and local residents around the country, now need to examine problems and shortages in cities and regions that can expect cyclical natural disasters, and raise a stink about the funding cuts that this administration ordered to pay for tax cuts for the rich and the war in Iraq.

We can’t let Bush's criminal war hurt us anywhere else like it did in New Orleans.

--Reach Joel Wendland at jwendland@politicalaffairs.net.